DOGMATISM OF THE STATIONARY PERIOD. 341 



ally forming: the practical instincts of man, their 

 impatience of tyranny, the progress of the useful 

 arts, the promises of alchemy, were all disposing 

 men to reject the authority and deny the preten- 

 sions of the received philosophical creed. Two an- 

 tagonist forms of opinion were in existence, which 

 for some time went on detached, and almost inde- 

 pendent of each other ; but, finally, these came into 

 conflict, at the time of Galileo ; and the war speedily 

 extended to every part of civilized Europe. 



3. Scholastic Physics. It is difficult to give 

 briefly any appropriate examples of the nature of 

 the Aristotelian physics which are to be found in 

 the works of this time. As the gravity of bodies 

 was one of the first subjects of dispute when the 

 struggle of the rival methods began, we may notice 

 the mode in which it was treated 20 . "Zabarella 

 maintains that the proximate cause of the motion 

 of elements is the form, in the Aristotelian sense of 

 the term : but to this sentence we," says Keeker- 

 man, "cannot agree; for in all other things the 

 form is the proximate cause, not of the act, but 

 of the power or faculty from which the act flows. 

 Thus in man, the rational soul is not the cause of 

 the act of laughing, but of the risible faculty or 

 power." Keckerman's system was at one time a 

 work of considerable authority : it was published 

 in 1 614. By comparing and systematizing what he 

 finds in Aristotle, he is led to state his results in the 



20 Keckerman, p. 1428. 



